Crazy Lady (29 page)

“OK,” repeats Daphne as if she is trying to work out what the expression means. Then a few tears dribbles down her cheeks. “Do you know, you never fully realize how much you really love someone until they're gone.”

“Pave paradise and put up a parking lot,” sings Trina and Daphne gives her a quizzical look. “From the sixties,” explains Trina. “Joni Mitchell I think. You don't know what you've got till it's gone.”

Daphne pauses in thought for a few seconds as she drinks some fresh local pineapple juice, and then she puts down the glass. “Actually that's not really true. Minnie may have been a bit of a silly old woman, and I could get pretty cross with her at times, but I think I did know what I had. I think you do know when, deep down, you really truly love someone.”

Joseph Creston stopped shedding tears for Janet long ago, but now, as he sits by her bed in Vancouver, he still conjures images of the perky teenager he could never take his eyes off. Janet may be a hollow shadow, barely a ghost of the young woman he remembers, yet her spirit, her essence, has never left his mind.

“What do you think about me taking her to England, doctor?” he asks as the physician does his daily round. But Mike Phillips has already spiked that idea, and the medic shakes his head firmly. “Absolutely not possible. Not at the moment.”

“But you said you would consider it,” pushes Creston, seeing his plan unravelling.

“And I have, Mr. Creston. And I'm saying no.”

“Maybe I should speak to the administrator?”

“You could call the Lord himself, sir, but it's my decision and I'm saying she's not fit to go anywhere.”

Creston, unused to hearing “No” from anyone, rises quickly. “I could get a second opinion.”

“Naturally.”

Then he backs down and takes a different path. Putting on a smile he places a warm hand on the doctor's shoulder. “Maybe there's something I could do for you? I mean, how
much do they pay you here? Not a lot if our National Health Service is anything to go on. What if I took you on to look after Janet? A couple of hundred thousand to start — we could call it a ‘golden hello' and then —”

Doctor Jurgen shakes off Creston's hand and looks fiercely into the other man's eyes. “I said she is not fit to travel.”

“I know, but —”

“Look… sir…” the doctor starts, then changes his mind and picks up Janet's wrist, searching for her pulse.

“So?” questions Creston hopefully.

“So,” the doctor repeats glowering fiercely. “You decide what's more important, Mr. Creston: your wife's well-being or you getting your own way.”

“I'll get another opinion,” Creston yells after the doctor as he closes the door behind him.

“
T
ime for prayers,” says Mike Phillips as he rounds up several members of his gang a few days after Christmas, but it's a couple of weeks since Craddock slipped his noose and the entire investigation has stalled over the holidays. Trina and Daphne have returned from paradise to a drizzly Vancouver winter. Janet Thurgood is making a slow recovery, and Creston has been forced back to London by a flare-up of civil unrest in Côte d'Ivoire.

“We've got to get our people out of there,” Mason told his chief in a panic. But in Creston's eyes “his people” include only the white traders and buyers. The indigenous farmers will have to fight for themselves.

“We've got the DNA back from the lab,” reports one of Phillips' men as they sit around an untouched box of Christmas chocolates, but the positive results change nothing. They already know that Janet was confined in Craddock's van and bedroom, that he gagged her with duct tape, and that she was with him at the airport hotel. But
the forensic evidence, though crucial in a criminal trial, will end up on the cutting room floor unless the villain of the piece can be found.

“Anything more on the money trail?' asks Phillips with a nod to the officer he asked to track down Beautiful's books.

“Have you ever tried to deal with Revenue Canada?” spits the constable. “More red tape than a Valentine's bouquet.”

“Nothing at all?” queries Phillips.

“They're looking into it, boss,” she says, but her tone suggests she knows different.

“Keep on them,” says the inspector, then he looks around the room at the officers with the realization that the time is fast approaching when he'll be forced to stand them down and move on to more current matters. “Anything else… anyone?” he asks hopefully.

“Maybe the Thurgood woman will give us something when she's stronger,” suggests one officer, but Phillips shakes his head. “Not if her husband is around. He's already hired that dick-shit lawyer Rudy Clayton to represent her, and he's warned me to expect a lawsuit if I even break wind within earshot of her without his permission.”

“What's Creston scared of?”

Phillips is well aware of the allegations concerning Janet's dead children — Daphne and Trina have given him the full picture — but he sees no point in blackening the woman. Whatever happened in England forty years ago, Janet is today's victim in Canada. “I wish I knew,” he says slowly. “I wish I knew.”

Joseph Creston's fears over his wife are on his back burner with a high-priced lawyer standing guard over her bed. The inter-religious fighting in Abidjan and other cities of Côte d'Ivoire are playing havoc with cocoa supplies, though he's already shifting his staff and resources to neighbouring countries.

“The futures are up again,” John Dawes tells him at the weekly progress meeting, but it doesn't bring the expected smile.

“And the good news?” queries Creston, knowing that higher prices at one end mean lower sales at the other.

The accountant is more bullish. “Overall we could still be up two or three percent on the year.”

“What about financing? Have we covered the situation left by Canada?”

“Yes. We've got a place in Nicaragua offering a similar deal — fifteen percent.”

“Still cheaper than Inland Revenue. Set it up,” orders Creston, knowing that Dawes has probably already done so.

“Any news on Janet, J.C.?” asks Mason once Dawes has left.

“Yeah. I wanted to talk to you about that. I want to bring her back. That man of yours at the Yard has squared everything hasn't he?”

“As far as I know.”

“Did we pay him?”

“Four big ones.”

“Then let's assume it's done. Start making arrangements. She's going to need a passport and stuff.”

Creston's four thousand pounds may have filled a hole in Michael Edwards' pocket, but he doesn't have a smile on his face as he sits, shuffling papers, in his office at Scotland Yard. A sense of unease has been gnawing at him for a while, thanks largely to the very guarded response he received from Ted Donaldson, Daphne's friend, at Westchester Police Station.

“Just cleaning up old files,” Edwards told his opposite number when he asked for anything relating to the Creston deaths. “I've got a mandate from God,” he carried on chat-tily, referring obliquely to the Home Secretary. “I'm supposed to feed the whiz-bang fact eater with every suspicious death case going back fifty years.”

“That damn computer of yours is taking over everything,” moaned Donaldson, complaining about the Police National Computer, then he joked, “I tried to do a wanted person check the other day and it asked me if I'd had my morning crap.”

“Funny,” Edwards said, forcing a laugh, then he pushed harder. “Anyway, Ted, these Creston cases. We don't seem to have anything recorded, and I don't want to have to send it upstairs on paper.”

Donaldson shrugged off the threat, recalling his search through the records with Daphne. “You can send it to God herself if you like,” replied Donaldson. “It won't make any difference. There's no paperwork. It was natural causes times three.”

But Ted Donaldson has worn his superintendent's crown long enough to know when he is being taken for a ride and eventually calls David Bliss.

“It certainly sounds iffy to me,” admits Bliss as he sits under the warm midwinter sun outside the bar L'Escale sipping a cappuccino while finishing his novel. “I'll find out and get back to you.”

Knowing Edwards I bet it's something tricky
, Bliss tells himself, then realizes that the chief superintendent's cunning antecedent, Louis XIV, was equally renowned for his deviousness. By the time he starts a second cappuccino, he has found a suitable anecdote to include as a vignette in an earlier chapter.

“Come, my dear marquis,” said the king,
writes Bliss, referring to the French monarch's gaming partner, the Marquis of Dangeau.
“I have word the Maréchal de Gramont intends to prostrate himself at my feet to seek a favour for one of his idiot nephews and I wish to groom you in the sport of diplomacy.” Then, with Dangeau at his back, Louis bustled out of his chamber as if in a great rage and burst upon Gramont, who pulled up short and made his obeisance.

“Ah. My dear Gramont,” bellowed the king. “Just the man I seek.” Then he thrust a paper at the maréchal, saying, “Take a look at that. 'Tis supposedly a sonnet. Though 'tis in my view one of the worst I have yet seen.”

“I must agree,” said Gramont scanning the few lines. “The absolute worst.”

“'Tis utter rubbish,” continued the king, snatching back the paper and tearing it to shreds.

“'Tis true, Sire,” said the maréchal, sensing that he was on the winning side.

“Childish nonsense,” carried on the king, still in high dudgeon as he threw it to the ground and stomped upon it.

“One of the most puerile poems yet devised,” pressed Gramont, then he sensed that he might gain some leverage if he knew the author.

“The author!” exclaimed the king, upon Gramont's inquiry. “Why it was me of course. I wrote it… Now what is it that you wished to ask of me?”

With a satisfied smirk and an eye on the clock, Bliss finally folds his manuscript and phones his son-in-law at home.

“Enemy action, Peter,” he says, using code, despite the fact that the chief inspector is on his cellphone. “A certain chief super is trying to get his hands on documents relating to the Creston murders.”

“Murders?” echoes Bryan. “That's only what Daphne reckons.”

“I've never known her to be wrong,” carries on Bliss. “Anyway, why would our man be interested?”

“Not him,” agrees Peter Bryan. “But I bet his handler is.”

“Anything on that front?” questions Bliss.

“Actually, Dave, yes. Quite a bit,” says his son-in-law, before outlining how the officer assigned to tail Edwards, once internal affairs was alerted about the senior man's involvement with Creston, found him at lunch in a pricey restaurant with Mason.

“Apparently they didn't speak,” Peter Bryan continues, “but Mason left his
Times
on the table and Edwards snatched it faster than a pigeon on a sandwich in Trafalgar Square.”

“That's pretty old-fashioned stuff,” scoffs Bliss. “Mind, he's not exactly James Bond. So, what was in the paper?”

“Maybe he just wanted something intellectual to read for a change,” suggests Bryan sarcastically. “But the tail said he just rolled it up, paid his bill, and got out of there faster then a scorched rabbit.”

Daphne Lovelace is also preparing to leave.

“I'd better get back to Missie Rouge,” she explains to Trina as they sit over the breakfast table. “I've been here more than three weeks.”

But the Canadian woman looks crestfallen. “You can't,” she says. “Not yet. We still haven't finished the case.”

Daphne smiles at her friend's enthusiasm. “I think we did all right.”

“No,” insists Trina grumpily. “We didn't get anywhere. Craddock is still on the run, that Beautiful joint is still as freaky as ever, and Creston's got Janet back — according to Mike Phillips, she'll be gone in a few days. We never did find out what happened to her kids…”

Daphne lays a hand over Trina's. “At least we helped save Janet's life.”

“Life,” spits Trina. “That's not life. Not what she had. She was just a slave.”

“I guess some women are happy being slaves,” says Daphne despairingly. “Some women just like to serve men. They think it's their duty. For some women, the more they are disrespected the harder they try to please.”

“Not me,” says Trina.

“Me, neither,” agrees Daphne. “But some just keep pleading for more.”

“Reverse psychology,” suggests Trina knowingly.

“Oh poor little me. What to do? My husband won't talk to me anymore,” whines Daphne, smoothing back her hair, and Trina laughs as Daphne continues, “I shall have to pamper him — cook him nice dinners…”

“That would be nice for a change,” says Rick Button as he slips in to give Trina a goodbye kiss. “So what adventures are you two cooking up today?”

“Actually, I'm going home,” says Daphne.

“Oh,” he replies with a look to his wife. “Does this mean you're going back to work?”

“Guess so,” she says then she gives him a friendly poke. “Hey, we've been working.”

“Hawaii,” he sneers.

“Lovelace and Button, International Investigators,” she reminds him as he makes for the door.

Last chapter
, Bliss tells himself as he begins with a clean sheet and a glass of Côtes du Provençe at L'Escale. The chilled nor'westerly wind, the mistral, sweeping down the valley of the Rhone from the distant Alps has taken the last vestiges of the summer's heat and pushed it south to the savannahs and deserts of Africa. The wintry nip may have forced Bliss indoors, but through the misted window of the bar the masked man's island fortress stands out sharply against a cobalt background in the clean mountain air, and the remnants of his great testament, the Château Roger, are clearly visible through the windblown vegetation.